So, You Want The Soft Life?

So, you want the soft life?

I, too, dream of the soft life1 …a life filled with ease and enjoyment. Well, girl to girl: there are three ways to attain this. (And yes, yes: there are exceptions, and there is nuance, and blah, blah, blah… whatabouters, while I can hang with the best of you, I suggest you either take a seat or sit this one out).

^{You’re Gonna Give Me the Love I Need, 2010. Mickalene Thomas. ©️ Mickalene Thomas}

Option one: be born into the soft life. Do you have a parent or two with enough money to allow you to be unironically considered an heiress? Or a wealthy relative who has left a substantial share of their earthly possessions to you? And can the family fortune be meaningfully measured2 in Great British pounds, euros or dollars? If your answer to at least two of these questions is yes, congratulations! You have won life’s lottery. You can exit this essay.

Parting advice: please stop wasting your one lucky life trying to prove you are good enough without your last name. No one cares. There are no prizes for suffering. If you insist on doing something, do anything but be boring. You see, there was a time when the bourgeoisie built infrastructure for society: railroads, libraries, museums, and the like. But fortunately for you, we are in the social media age where all the masses ask for is a day-in-the-life vlog and an #OOTD. Elevate our consciousness with beautiful things. There is no shame in this game. Beauty is, after all, a social good. Becca Bloom, why yes, I’d like to watch you feed your cat caviar on Hermès dishware. Temi Otedola, please keep recording every day of your life foreverrrrr. Let us eat cake.

Oops, I digress. On to option two: marry into the soft life. I will never shame a woman for relying on a man for economic ascent (reparations, you know). I will, however, absolutely, one hundred percent, shame a woman for doing it stupidly. Hypergamy requires strategy. What, you think because I am a feminist, I am above being taken care of by a man myself? I contain multitudes. In fact, at least once a quarter, I sit at my work desk and get lost in an extensive, hyper-specific daydream.

In my dream, a Forbes-listed man and I fall madly in love. Or maybe, we simply make a practical decision to be in each other’s lives because we see utility in each other. I am a lover girl…a yearner, in fact… but I am not above being a pragmatist. We all have a price. As soon as he and I become a we, my first order of business is to shut down my businesses. Once I dissolve my LLC and my 501(c)(3), I delete the knowledge of what such things mean from my brain: my mind needs space to luxuriate in luxurious thoughts. While I am on a deleting spree, I permanently delete my personal website and public social media accounts. Thanks to the iron-clad prenup and the financial arrangements negotiated and documented with the precision of a corporate merger, I can afford privacy. Personal brands are so proletariat.

Up next: I assemble my team. This includes personal shoppers, stylists, personal trainers, chefs, sommeliers and a coterie of wellness gurus that will allow me to live out all my woo-woo desires in peace. Speaking of living, now that my money is long, I need to live longer, so I put Andrew Huberman on retainer. His contract requires him to email me monthly health maxxing plans—five bullet points, max. I will never again sit through one of his two-hour podcast episodes. Buying brevity wherever I can is one of the great delights of this new life.

All this doesn’t mean I won’t be working. Being a trophy wife and a socialite is honest, full-time work. I am Type A and the first law of thermodynamics applies here: energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely transformed. I throw mine into hosting fabulous soirées and salons. My invitations become social gold for the crème de la crème of the if-you-know-you-know crowd. To host said events, I spend time furnishing our homes and flats around the world (naturally, I acquire a few homes and flats solely in my name). The countless hours I’ve spent dilly-dallying around art galleries and museums prove useful: when people attend my parties, they will marvel at the art-collecting eye and design taste I’ve long had, and now finally have the budget to properly display.

My social diary is also filled with board commitments. With my previous board experience, professional background and newly acquired wealth, the board world is my oyster. I will choose some cultural institution boards (because: joy), non-profit boards (because: morals), and corporate boards (because: money).

Oh, but the details…the details are where fantasies go to unravel. This life is not labor-free. I heard Shonda Rhimes describe Bridgerton as a workplace drama at a panel at Cannes Lions once. I hadn’t thought about it until then, but marriage is indeed one of the oldest forms of employment, and the husband search is an age-old job-hunt tradition. For starters, there is the beauty labor. While my preferred amount of aesthetic maintenance is close to abysmal, my appearance is now part of the value proposition. I cannot ask a man to play a traditional role (be a provider) and get righteous when he asks me to conform to traditional beauty standards. Plus, while I can’t control if my partner cheats on me or not—men will men—let it never be said he did so because he didn’t find me physically attractive anymore. How often will he expect me to wear heels or have a full face beat? Will plastic surgery be on the menu? What bizarre treatments will I feel compelled to try to combat the professional hazard that is aging in my new line of work?

Mind you, will this man even be attractive to me? Realistically, how many men exist at the intersection of extreme wealth and moderate attractiveness? Imagine enduring the torture of waist trainers for a man with a potbelly, or the discomfort of a lace front for a man with a receding hairline. Bro.

While we’re on the hairline matter, will attainment of this soft life require me to expend what’s left of my youth on a septuagenarian, octogenarian, or a nonagenarian?

And we haven’t even gotten to the caregiving labor bit. My man’s happiness is the measurement and evaluation metric—the main KPI—of this job. How much, and in how many ways will I need to massage his ego? A male friend once told me I am an ungovernable woman and I was truly delighted—he had unintentionally confirmed the pinnacle of my life’s self-work. But what was once an asset will undoubtedly be a professional liability here. How much indigestion will I have to tolerate from so frequently having to swallow my opinions? How many times will I bleed from biting my tongue? How much money is worth shrinking this full self I’ve spent a lifetime building? A lot. The answer is a whole lot. But then there is this: men with abnormal amounts of money are rarely…normal. On a scale of eccentric to the Epstein list, what degree of madness will I need to tolerate? Will I need to turn a blind eye to pedestrian philandering, or will there be pinches of pedophilia, too? While we are talking about what my man does with his private parts, what will my sex labor entail? How much, and in how many ways?

The most important thing I’ll be trading to gain this soft life is my hard-earned autonomy. Marriage, something I don’t care to do again, is the only option on this path. I once saw a TikToker talk about being a stay-at-home girlfriend, and I wished I could reach through my phone and sprinkle a few sense-filled slaps across her face. This isn’t about respectability: marriage provides the legal, financial and social protections that being a girlfriend or mistress cannot (as long as you don’t Belle Burden the situation).

When I start to balance the benefits of this life against its costs, the ROI starts to feel less appealing. It’s usually at this point I snap out of my daydream and face my front.

You can earn your way into the soft life (or die trying). Look, they say your degrees won’t keep you warm at night, but I slept last night in a room warmed by the trappings my education-cum-income have afforded me: a heater I paid for, a Queen-sized bed that is fully mine, and a room of my own. When I woke up, sans alarm, the only things I could hear were the swirl of thoughts in my head, the chirping of birds in the trees outside my window, and the clank of my dishes being washed by someone I pay to do so. Whenever I spend time with my sister and her two tinies, I am reminded that this—silence, waking when I desire, and finding things exactly as I left them—is a privilege. In my post 9-5 era, my days have become an interesting design challenge. I can decide where to work (my co-working space, a coffee shop, my couch, a bar, a restaurant…all that matters is I have Wi-Fi and a laptop plug), what I work on, when I work, and with whom.

I work out when I want, too. Lately, I’ve become a Pilates mom, without the kids, sans the Pilates (I got got by the HYROX cult). You can frequently find me in the gym in the late morning or early afternoon, upset that the other people there are not doing adult things like wearing suits, and speaking corporate jargon in board rooms. Sometimes, I sit in the steam room, sauna, or jacuzzi at my gym in the middle of the day just because I feel like it.

Before I got out of bed today, I texted a friend and asked: “What are we doing tonight?” I spent last summer gallivanting around Europe because I could. This year, I decided to keep my feet planted in the city I up and moved to for the plot: Johannesburg. My nights are filled with interesting people and interesting things. Jazz concerts. Art exhibits. Design fairs. Wine bars. Dinners. Dancing. Plays. Concerts. Films. TV reruns in my sweatshirts and socks. My friend responded immediately: “Whatever we want. We’re grown!” Indeed, indeed.

I don’t owe anyone a damn thing. This is my wealth: I am debt free, not just financially, but spiritually, emotionally, physically and mentally. I am fueled by the knowledge that I do not need anyone’s approval for my life’s choices. I am nourished by the knowing that I do not need a man for my sustainment. In this life, men are appetizers or dessert, but never the main course.

Lest we conclude this essay riding into the sunset to the sound of sweet violins, the sovereign soft life is not all sunshine and butterflies either. Freedom isn’t free to obtain, or cheap to maintain, my babes.

Last year, I worked so hard my hair fell out of my scalp, and cystic acne mapped my face. Don’t let the influencer CEOs fool you—running your own thing can run you mad. As I type this essay, my assistant has pinged me to tell me a client wants to revise a project—one that has already been revised at least half a dozen times. I want to scream and break things, but instead I will say yes, please, thank you, and you can have it however you like it. I may not be spreading my legs, but thanks to my appetite for the finer things in life, I am a whore no less. Ain’t no shame in this game, either. No matter what the Nap Ministry preaches on Instagram, sleep is far sweeter in business or first class than it is in economy class.

But the hardest labor this life has required of me hasn’t been professional—it’s emotional. Becoming truly sovereign requires a certain degree of gangster. Enough gangster to navigate emotional ghettos most people spend a lifetime avoiding. Enough gangster to sit in solitude, make silence your soundtrack, and raw-dog cold facts and hard realities till you come to your truth. Enough gangster to live and serve your truth, straight no chaser. Bro, do you know how much of a thug you need to be to tell your Nigerian-Pastor-Mother you are getting a divorce whether she approves or not? To leave a fancy job with no backup plan or trust fund? To move to a new continent without a family, spouse, friend group, job or education program providing you with built-in community? To forego likeability and social capital for authenticity and autonomy? I have made many trades at life’s corners.

In the end, every dream has its invoice. This universe is a marketplace. We don’t get to decide whether we’ll make trade-offs—we only get to decide what we’re willing to sacrifice for.

So, my darling: which struggle will you choose?

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